2019 NHBB Online
- See also: Question recycling
The 2019 "NHBB" Discord Tournament, also known colloquially as "NHBB Online", was an online history bee-style "tournament" held during April 2019 on Discord servers. The brainchild of 8th grade Laurel Springs NHB player Ameya Singh, the "tournament" was won by Sam Brochin in a small field. Asides from the fact that some called it a logistical "mess", the event also attracted controversy after it was revealed that a large number of questions it used were knowingly plagiarized from existing packets, rendering it not a true tournament, but instead a scrimmage, and resulting in a minor scandal. This incident was important because it helped raise several questions pertaining to the honesty of student tournament directors. It was derided as a farce by some commenters, who expressed gratefulness that this tournament did not charge players money to participate.
The Scrimmage Begins
The event had consistently promoted itself on the HSQuizbowl.org forums as a housewrite "based off of NHBB/IHB packets." After its preliminary stages had concluded, attempts were made to upload the first three packets onto the packet archive, leading many observers and noted members of the QB community to note that comments on the Discord had implied that the questions had been adapted from existing questions, which would have barred them from being posted. The packets in question were instead posted to the forums for review, where many of the tossups were verified to have been directly copied from past tournaments. Other writers participating in the project provided chat logs that indicated that this plagiarism was not only intentional.
There was also additional concern over the choice to explicitly label the event as the "NHBB Discord Tournament", despite not being affiliated with or connected to NHBB or International Academic Competitions (IAC) in any way. Though such connections were admittedly denied, such denials were only found in niche areas of associated discussion, thus preventing most from accessing them.
The Scrimmage Concludes
In the midst of this controversy, the organizer of the event elected to continue, indicating that they would continue to draw questions from existing packets, but not post them. This drew additional censure, as did a later attempt by the organizer to run multiple other such events. Ultimately, the final round was run on a packet of housewritten tossups.
As a direct result of these events, a new category on the forums was created to advertise for and organize scrimmages using clear packets.
Packets used
Samples from the prelims include: